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Hugh Pickens writes "Megan Garber writes that in the age of the quantified self, biases are just one more thing that can be measured, analyzed, and publicized. The day after Barack Obama won a second term as president of the United States, a group of geography academics took advantage of the fact that many tweets are geocoded to search Twitter for racism-revealing terms that appeared in the context of tweets that mentioned 'Obama,' 're-elected,' or 'won,' sorting the tweets according to the state they were sent from and comparing the racist tweets to the total number of geocoded tweets coming from that state during the same time period. Their findings? Alabama and Mississippi have the highest measures followed closely by Georgia, Louisiana, and Tennessee forming a fairly distinctive cluster in the southeast. Beyond that cluster North Dakota and Utah both had relatively high scores (3.5 each), as did Missouri, Oregon, and Minnesota. 'These findings support the idea that there are some fairly strong clustering of hate tweets centered in southeastern U.S. which has a much higher rate than the national average,' writes Matthew Zook. 'But lest anyone elsewhere become too complacent, the unfortunate fact is that most states are not immune from this kind of activity. Racist behavior, particularly directed at African Americans in the U.S., is all too easy to find both offline and in information space.'"

One racist sending 100 racist tweets is not the same as 100 different racists each sending one racist tweet each.

Reading the article it doesn't look like they bothered. And they only found a total of 395 tweets which will lead to appalling precision in any of their findings. Sadly 'information scientists' don't always appear to be the best statisticians.

With only a couple of days work this isn't bad. But it's not science, it's interest and a proof of concept for doing actual research.

I accept they didn't work very hard on this but in that case its irresponsible to be promoting the findings among people who clearly won't bother to understand the (immense) limitations of the method. It's slightly irritating that as far as the general public is concerned this kind of back of the envelope calculation is indistinguishable from proper science. I wouldn't publicise any findings until I'd had them peer-reviewed and published. But then maybe I'm old-fashioned (and maybe this is why I don't have an academic blog)

I wouldn't publicise any findings until I'd had them peer-reviewed and published.

Then you'd never get funding for a project like this.

They're demonstrating that there might be something interesting to study, the press lets them ask for money rather than beg, and they're not all that invested in a project that might not go anywhere.

its irresponsible to be promoting the findings among people who clearly won't bother to understand

I hate to break it to you, but the press doesn't understand peer reviewed work any better. Whenever media ever looks at any academic work they completely misrepresent it. That's something you get used to.

I hate to break it to you, but the press doesn't understand peer reviewed work any better. Whenever media ever looks at any academic work they completely misrepresent it. That's something you get used to.

You are right but this means that the peer review filter is even more important so that what gets out to the media and beyond has at least some chance of being right. Also, having been through the process a few times I'd say academics are at least as guilty of overstating their findings as journalists. We want the headlines and the 'impact' as much as journalists to.

what gets out to the media and beyond has at least some chance of being right

I don't think that has ever worked for anyone in the last 20 years I have no reason to believe it will start now.

Not too long ago/. had posts from the communications department of the university of western ontario, which is where I am a researcher, and from our own university the document was a poor characterization of what the research actually was (HIV vaccine stuff in this case, though I'm in comp sci and they don't do our work any better). Somewhere along the line someone decided that the 'public' only understand high level concepts, so everything we communicate is written as thought it was for a 16 year old to understand. It doesn't matter than dozens of other research papers and groups will actually have to do the work to make the thing the 16 year old understand though, we talk about pieces of a puzzle as though they are a solution to the puzzle. And there's no central media authority who might change it.

Somewhere along the line someone decided that the 'public' only understand high level concepts, so everything we communicate is written as thought it was for a 16 year old to understand.

I don't know if it's true or not, but I've heard that it's common for news sources to target somewhere near a 6-8th grade reading and comprehension level. I imagine that's a pragmatic approach if you'd like to get a message out and reach is more important than detail.

As for this little report, I noticed that you see dots where there are lots of people, and a shotgun pattern in the deep south. Not particularly surprising.

I'd like to see something like this that figures racists tweets by unique persons, as a

With only a couple of days work this isn't bad. But it's not science, it's interest and a proof of concept for doing actual research.

I think it's absolutely horrible and the fact that these states names but not their numbers have found their way into headlines and a Slashdot summary makes me sick. They might have been right to indict the Southern states that we already know have issues along these lines but their map of tweets [geocommons.com] lists precisely one tweet for Utah and one tweet for North Dakota. The really appalling thing about the North Dakota tweet is that it is geolocated to Minot, a town that has seen an explosive growth in transient workers from states like Oklahoma and Texas in order to meet the demand for workers with oil specialties in the oil fields near there. It's probably a fifty/fifty shot the tweet was from an actual permanent resident of North Dakota.

Basically if a low population states hits the top of your study and the data is that sparse (one tweet!) then I think you should omit that as an outlier and stricken those names from your press release. It's great to recognize these things in your data and to talk about them in your analysis. It's unjust to propagate just their names throughout the news making people think that North Dakota is not only cold and sparsely populated but it's also racist.

Someone in Salt Lake City could have been joking in one tweet and suddenly Utah is one of the most racist states in a Slashdot summary. A transient worker who feels like lost his job in OK and had to use his CDL in Minot, ND because a black man was president could fire off an ignorant tweet and suddenly North Dakota is full of racists.

The floatingsheep page specifically says, "we are measuring tweets rather than users and so one individual could be responsible for many tweets and in some cases (most notably in North Dakota, Utah and Minnesota) the number of hate tweets is small and the high LQ is driven by the relatively low number of overall tweets." It's not their fault that the author of the Atlantic article left out those details.

The floatingsheep page specifically says, "we are measuring tweets rather than users and so one individual could be responsible for many tweets and in some cases (most notably in North Dakota, Utah and Minnesota) the number of hate tweets is small and the high LQ is driven by the relatively low number of overall tweets." It's not their fault that the author of the Atlantic article left out those details.

It is their fault for publishing crap that they know will be headline grabbing, no matter how many caveats they put in.

The floatingsheep page specifically says, "we are measuring tweets rather than users and so one individual could be responsible for many tweets and in some cases (most notably in North Dakota, Utah and Minnesota) the number of hate tweets is small and the high LQ is driven by the relatively low number of overall tweets." It's not their fault that the author of the Atlantic article left out those details.

It is their fault for publishing crap that they know will be headline grabbing, no matter how many caveats they put in.

Funding. That's how they get it. Post raw data that suggests a problem, apply for funding to monitor and/or fix the problem, rinse and repeat. Academia lives on funding. Without it, those statisticians would have to go get real jobs.

You clearly did not look at the website. The guys who did this are in academia, but the website is not an academic publication nor would any of the stuff they post garner funding. Their top articles include such things as "The Beer Belly of America", "The Price of Weed", "Church vs. Beer? on Twitter" and "Church, bowling, guns and strip clubs."

They're doing this as a fun hobby, not serious academic research. There is no funding, no grants, nothing.

Did you miss the section of the website titled "Publications"? And are you familiar with the concept "publish or perish"? I suspect they're having fun whilst trying not to perish.

As for the "no academic research", that's certainly true - I don't think I've seen any less scientific crap since some students spray-painted some grey squirrels red in order to balance the size of the two populations.

Actually, it is ridiculously terrible. All it shows is that geolocated timestamped messages can be searched, but either their search criteria was awful or there aren't enough people creating these things to draw any conclusions about a meaningful population. The fact that they then tried to draw state-level conclusions on this dataset shows a feeble grasp of statistics.

BTW, I just checked out a sample size calculator [surveysystem.com]. For a 95 percent confidence level with a +- 5% confidence interval, and a population of 400 million, guess what your sample size needs to be.

384.

Now this calculation for a survey is a little different from what the researchers are doing here, but it illustrates my point. You can do a lot with small sample sizes if the differences between groups are large.

BTW, I just checked out a sample size calculator [surveysystem.com]. For a 95 percent confidence level with a +- 5% confidence interval, and a population of 400 million, guess what your sample size needs to be.

384.

Now this calculation for a survey is a little different from what the researchers are doing here, but it illustrates my point. You can do a lot with small sample sizes if the differences between groups are large.

That's if they're only trying to estimate a grand rate. To make state-by-state estimates they need this number *per state*.

Reading the article it doesn't look like they bothered. And they only found a total of 395 tweets which will lead to appalling precision in any of their findings. Sadly 'information scientists' don't always appear to be the best statisticians.

What findings? Apart from actual racism, racist tweeds correlate with Internet penetration, Twitter penetration, trolls, teenagers, and locale-specific slang. In other words, the study is utterly worthless, regardless of the skill of whoever interprets the data, becau

Random people on the internet seem to not do well at statistics either...

In this specific case, the total sample size of 395 tweets could easily be enough, especially if they came from a couple states and different accounts. However, what is more damning is looking at the actual number from each state (someone else above says they only had one each for some of the states they rank as racist), and the issue that it could be a single poster in each state making a lot of tweets. So no, it is not the total number of tweets that is appalling, but the actual details.

Can you show me any situation where less than 400 samples is enough to estimate fixed effects across a variable with 50 factors? This is in fact what was done, whether on not the guys doing the calculation realised it.

The story also does not count African-American ("black") prejudice/racism toward Latino/Hispanic ("brown"). In reading many articles and comments, most people are unaware of this "black-on-brown" racism but, for those who live and work in minority areas, it is noticeable.

The Washington Times published a story (three weeks in the weekend issue, IIRC) about "black-on-brown" racism in some major metropolitan settings. One was Memphis (where I lived for 16 years as an adult). The article was full of African-Americans making interesting/telling complains about Latinos/Hispanics. Statements such as "they don't look like us"; "they don't talk like us"; "we can't understand what they say"; they don't eat the same food as we eat"; even, "they don't smell like us". Quite interesting and enlightening articles. Either African-Americans are just as racism as "white" people or the noticing of differences is a normal function of being a human and part of a group.

African-American are just as prejudiced against people who are not like them or are not a part of their group as any other group.

Personally, I am at a quandary. Since my ethnicity includes European (northern and southern), African (north and central), Asian (near, middle, and far), and the new "Latino" and older Hispanic, who should I disdain? Which part of me is less than the other individual parts? Quite a problem in our race-oriented political culture. Thankfully, the Knoxville News Sentential ran article on "white" Southerners quoting experts who said all had 5% African blood. This means all Southerners are African-American and can legally claim to be "black" and joint the NAACP, the New Black Panthers, the Democrat Party; they can also change their EEO status and qualify for Food Stamps, Scholarships, etc., etc. much, (Oops, which part of me am I ragging on now?) LOL!!!

STOP POINTING OUT FACTS! We just want to hear reinforcement of our stereotype that all white people are evil racists and all minorities are racially superior since they are completely incapable of being bigots towards anyone!

Now excuse me while I go to the Black Panther meeting where we discuss how we will be "poll volunteers" again in 2016 to make sure that [insert name of Democrate here] wins because any other vote is automatically racist.

Racism isn't just about mere feelings. It's about a group wielding power against others in ways that cause real harm.

That's what has me face-palming. From a purely academic standpoint it's an interesting result. However, what they've done is created a report looking for discrimination based on race, but reported it in a way which could be used by people to justify discrimination based on state of origin (e.g. "those stupid redneck racist Southerners").

395 racist tweets from a 0.05% sample works out to 790,000 racist tweets for the country. Even if you assume each racist only posted one racist tweet max, that's 0.25% of the country overall being racist. For the state with the highest rate (Alabama) that's 2%. In an effort to root out racism, this study is presenting their results in a careless fashion which could be used to justify discrimination and anti-Southerner stereotypes against 98% of Alabama residents because of a small minority of bad apples. It is doing the very thing it is criticizing.

395 that contained search terms that the searcher decided indicated racist intent. There's no indication that any of the tweets that came up were filtered for actual racist intent. For example "Obama won bitch, niggers back" would have came up as a "racist" tweet. However it's likely that such a tweet was not a racist and that the author of it was probably black. If you look at the clustering of where tweets were coming from you see that a high clustering was occurring in cities like Atlanta, Georgia or Montgomery, Alabama which has a majority of a minority population (54% black and 56.6% black respectively).

The study is flawed and was never properly scrubbed, but the results were posted because it fits a preconceived notion (the south is racist) when the majority of the effect that causes that effect to show may originate from the very population which is the victim of racism against blacks.

when person X cant get a scholarship to a college, eventhough their grades are higher than person Y, that is racism. when person X does not get a job as a police officer when they finish 3rd in the class, yet person Y -who finishes 15th in the class does get the job - that is racism

sure "white people" who have been dead for 100 years held "black people" who have also been dead for 100 years as slaves. but that was then, There is no reason "black person" should get anything special from "white person" today because neither of them had anything to do with slavery

While I understand the black on brown racisim exists, why would there be any black on brown racist tweets about Obama being re-elected? He isn't Latino. They were looking for racist comments about Obama. Just curious.

We got to do something about these Asians coming in and opening up businesses and dirty shops. They ought to go. Iâ(TM)m going to say that right now. But we need African-American businesspeople to be able to take their places, too.

They didn't. It's stated in the article. So prolific racists tweeters may have influenced the results some. I don't know if they also accounted for the common deliberate misspelling of the President's name (0bama), or referring to him as "Hussein" or other such references. I don't want to speculate on how racists on twitter usually refer to the President, but among haters on other forums, I've seen those two references at least as commonly as I've seen the man's name spelled correctly.

However, the content and frequency of the posts is also relevant, albeit less so in a quantitative analysis. In some parts of the world, it's an uphill battle to be an overt, extreme racist, and such people must resort to subtle and implied racism. In other parts of the world, with a critical mass of racists, it's much easier to be overt.

In other words, the comments of the racists say just about as much about the authors as they do of their silently supportive peers.

I love data porn and tried to play around with this interactive map [geocommons.com]. I lived in Minnesota for 23 years and do not recall it to be very racist -- even in the rural areas. So according to that map there are five red dots in Minnesota which are strangely all centered around the twin cities area (the most populated and liberal part of the state). And that data puts Minnesota mentionably close to the top of the list? But if I look at Virginia, I can't even count the number of red dots there's so many and it's not even halfway up the list? What the hell?

Do each of these red dots indicate a single tweet? What are the numbers and tweets that they're looking at here, I feel like the LQ value is not doing the best job of reflecting "racism."

The reason Virginia isn't very high up on the list despite the large number of racist tweets is that it was offset by an even larger number of non-racist tweets which aren't shown on the map. If you look at the floatingsheep page linked in the summary, they explain "we aggregated the 395 hate tweets to the state level and then normalized them by comparing them to the total number of geocoded tweets coming out of that state in the same time period."

This whole thing should be taken with a grain of salt.
You need to take population density into account. More people, more assholes, more asshole tweets.
Also the sample size is awfully small. So small in fact that multiple counts may weigh in much more significantly than they should.
Also not all twits are tied to a geolocation.
You also need to compare it to how the population is composed.

In fact you shouldn't use this data if you want to find out which states are more unpleasant than others. You could

They're only looking for racism directed against Obama, so they won't find (for example) black against white racism in Philadelphia or Latino against Caucasian racism in California. It is truly regrettable that certain organizations like the SPLC dilute their otherwise honorable mission by turning a blind eye to hate in some of its notable forms.

We all know the numbers are skewed.
You can make statistics do anything.
I live in Philadelphia. We live with Andy Reid and had Donovan McNabb for many years..
Statistically, McNabb threw the fewest interceptions in the NFL..... Factually, he couldn't hit a receiver's hands with a ball if he was given military targeting lasers.

The SPLC does in deed execute their honorable mission. Go to http://truthy.indiana.edu/ [indiana.edu] for other meme propagation and dissemination graphics so you can see that this is one lens to the output of a much larger engine.

SPLC catergorized the New Black Panther Party and it's leader as a Right-Wing Extremist group [splcenter.org], because, apparently, they never allowed for the possibility of a Left-Wing Extremeist group.

The data only accounts for racism specifically targetting Obama by the looks of it. So not surprisingly the states that lost the civil war have the most. But it appears to be counting tweets vs accounts. That makes a huge difference because it only takes one mouthy retard to drive your state up the ranks.

Wow, I wonder if there is a correlation between the way the state voted and their uncovering of racisim in tweets?

There are several kinds of racists:

a) Racists that don't know about/don't have accounts on Twitterb) Racists that have accounts on Twitter, but refuse to post racists tweetsc) Racists that have accounts on Twitter AND post racist tweets

if I had to guess there is probably no sophistication. I also think it's likely it doesn't pick up most racists because most of them are likely to be older people who don't use twitter. Also the example tweets in one of the links show it's generally all young people (surprisingly a lot of girls too - I thought they were more likely to keep their racism quiet) so I guess it's kind of cool what you can do with twitter's API but it doesn't mean much.

Aside from the problems people already mentioned, if you look in their FAQ, one correction they didn't even mention is correcting it for total Obama support. Obviously if a place has twice as many Obama opponents it's also going to have twice as many racist Obama opponents. But that doesn't prove that it has "more racist Obama opponents" in the sense we normally think of. If you want that you need ratios.

And 395 is a very small number. They mention that it's not a sample, but it's all the geocoded racist tweets they found, but since it is such a small number, they failed to account for the possibility that there just isn't a lot of racism in the first place, and even if they did look for ratios, "very small percentage compared to another very small percentage" isn't interesting.

And they mention they didn't bother checking all the hateful comments about Romney (they did check for anti-white comments, but they didn't check for comments reflecting other stereotypes). Their excuse is basically "we were trying to find out about racism, which that's not". The trouble with that reasoning is that while anti-Romney tweets are not germane to what they literally claim to be looking for, they are germane to the subtext of what they're looking for, which is that racism is a big problem--if there are a lot of anti-Romney tweets, that can show that the number of anti-Obama tweets is not really such a big deal. "Blacks called names almost as much as Mormons" makes a bad headline, after all.

if the results arent strictly scientific from a statisticians observation. The overarching point is to draw attention to this kind of behavior and place it in contexts such as the "you lie" incident during healthcare reform, the birther rhetoric and even the tea party itself. This was more an exercise in the patterns and processes of social inequality than it was a mathematical endeavor of quantification in my opinion, and it deserves further research into questions like what are the causes and solutions.

I work internationally, and when the term comes up in a context like, say Africa, where people feel like underdogs but are not minorities, or have multiple splits within the race as in China, it gets really complicated. The term has more meaning in USA or European contexts, perhaps, but since this is "Geomapping" it is a geographic study and I don't think this will work. t would be similar if you were trying to track "Classist" tweets across a geopolitical line where the economic strata are different. They should be measuring "aggression" or "separatism" or something. It would be easier if Twitter got people to add hashtags #Imatroll or #fromadickweed or #aggressiveshithead etc.

Actually, it's not the word, it's the person that makes it racist. As George Carlin ($deity bless his smutty soul) said "Eddie Murphy talks about niggers, but he's not a racist, don't be silly. He's a nigger". Is Carlin a racist for using the word? I kinda doubt that he is. And even if, he's not for using the word.

Words are, by themselves, nothing but just that. Words. Idioms to represent something, in case of a noun, to represent an item, a person or an idea. It's the intention behind the word that makes it racist or not. And that's not depending on the word. If a racist calls someone an Afro-American (or whatever the PC word is right now, sorry if I don't keep up with the bull but I prefer to be correct instead of PC), the intention is to use the word not only to ridicule PCness, but also to use the PC term to deem someone inferior.

It is not the word. It is the person that is racist. And by changing the politically correct term for it, you don't change racism. You just paint the shit in a different color, but it still reeks.

We knew nothing of the intentions of the speaker until they spoke, using words and vocabulary, inference, inflections, and other linguistic keys to understand their utterances.

Words can demean, save that those they target may not be demeaned by them. While Carlin used speech loosely and for great humor and insight, this particular choice poises Eddie Murphy dropping to a low common denominator of reference. Carlin may be no racist, but the term is demeaning nonetheless.

I might even believe you if you hadn't tagged the end of your post with:

"...especially processing conducted by faggots."

Maybe you are mixed, maybe not. Your post infers the prejudice with those words. I know the vocabulary, I understand the malice and fear behind them. Sadly, I live not far from where the KKK was founded and there are a lot of scared people of many races here. Each of them has racial "power" that's actually the flipside of fear. In my book: all are individuals, some better than others on th

Somehow a meme developed whereby people of color could use the N-word and believed that to be ok. I believe the use of the word carries negative implication no matter who uses it, any any context. It's protected speech.

So also is the f-word.

Your status as a bi-sexual of mixed-race is dubious in my mind, or you wouldn't be actively disrespecting yourself, and others that might be similar to you. Why hate yourself and allow that to propagate? You can be proud. This is 2012. Time to stand up and be counted for

Language is tricky. You can be what you want to be. My doubts about the nature of your posts has to do with your seeming self-reviling. You describe yourself in terms that don't connote pride, they connote self-loathing, which shouldn't be the case.

Along thru this thread, I've told you that you can use any words that you want; they're protected speech. Your inference, however, is that you seem to despise these things. Being of mixed race, part of the LGBTQ rainbow, these are who you are as an individual. I respect individuals. I don't respect negative labels.

For English, there is no real language police. There is, however, the semantical choices made by English speakers that contextually infer their contexts, and their meanings. Describe yourself in any way you see fit, but don't believe that others want to use the negative inference you've used as well. Indeed, these words are used to subjugate you by labeling you in negative terms. Those negative terms are viable. But they do little good.

That you may be perceived by others negatively is their misfortune. For you to do so, however, validates their negativity and prejudice. Be proud. Pride is a positive quality, and eschews the negative.

As a person who isn't a kid these days, and is completely unfamiliar with hip internet parlance (i.e. lives in the real world), terms like "faggot" and the n-word (I don't even want to type it) are still highly charged, and loaded with ugly context. I really doubt that most gay people or black people would also find these words fully acceptable (go find one, call them it, then try to tell them that its okay on 4chan so they should relax).

Words do have power. Words shape our understanding and conception of the world. Words with a loaded history of venom and hate still maintain a portion of that long after they stop being completely pejorative. It doesn't even matter what the speaker means, as meaning is created mostly by the perceiver.

Further, your being a bit naive. If someone calls me a "fag", I'm pretty sure they aren't critiquing my fashion sense, they are trying to tie me to a group which (for some stupid reason) they find undesirable. It is an insult which hinged on the idea that homosexuals are bad or dirty. This is the actual content behind the word. The word isn't bad, but the connections it requires to have meaning are.

Unless of course they are asking for a cigarette, or some firewood.

Hell, "fuck" has pretty much become a normal word now, but there still are some connotations lurking in the background which keeps me from ever really wanting to use it (I do, and often, but don't find it a point of pride).

Cracker Barrel isn't meant as a term of offense. Specifically, it's a term coined because general stores in the 19th centuries kept items, Like crackers in large barrels. Though, I wouldn't hold them up as a standard of racial harmony considering how many times they've been sued for racial discrimination.

And yet they're not even close to being the same thing. In the case of Cracker Barrel, 'cracker' has more than 1 commonly used definition and it's clearly not the racial slur in the case of the restaurant. Also, the racial slur 'cracker' doesn't have the same cultural baggage associated with it [youtube.com]. For example, you won't find it hard to use the word 'cracker' on network television, but it would be incredibly hard to get permission to use the word 'nigger'. There are few places in the U.S. where a white person

The reelection of the first non-white person to be president in the USA was the biggest and most-watched news event, any type of racism not aimed at Obama would not relevant, regardless of where it came from or was aimed at.

When white people hate black people, the people who are harmed the most by it are black people.

When black people hate white people, the people who are harmed the most by it are black people.

In the US there are more white people than black people and the white people have more power. The situation is not symmetric.

For now, the 'specific type' of racism that was measured is still important in a way that the others aren't, even if the others are important also. Soon white people will be a minority, but then black racism still won't be a large threat to white people, it will be asian and hispanic racism, or the absence of it, that affects them primarily.

I agree that racism is a better term than reverse racism. But its BS when people (not necessarily you) bemoan the fact that black racism isn't treated like white racism. Likewise for when people complain of "class warfare" when rich people are criticized for abusing the power that money gives them. (When a poor person thinks that rich people should pay more taxes, and politicians pander to that, it doesn't harm the rich person in anything like the way the poor person is harmed by the self serving actions of the rich person. Getting laid off to increase the quarterly earnings of an already profitable company, for instance, is a lot worse than a multi-millionaire having to pay 20% capital gains tax instead of 15%. The argument is made that higher capital gains taxes would hurt poor people because it discourages investment. This ignores the fact that 'investment' activity is often more parasitic in nature rather than economically constructive. But even supposing the argument is valid, it still illustrates the asymmetry - its the poor person who suffers in both cases. This doesn't imply that rich people are 'worse' than poor people, or that poor people would be any kinder if their roles were reversed. But it does mean that when you're successful, the wealth you acquire gives you more power to affect other people, and you're responsible for what you do with that.)

I consider myself to be racist, and its something I'm not entirely ashamed of. I don't think that cultures are in every sense equivalent, and I don't think that all kinds of intelligence are uniformly distributed across genetic groups. Its BS when black people act like their worst stereotypes then complain of racism when they get criticized for it. But its worse to use even real weaknesses and shortcomings of other people as an excuse to unjustly abuse and exploit them when you have the power to do that. From where I stand, white people who try to draw an equivalence between black and white racism generally don't see anything like the truth about how grievously black people have been fucked over by white people. And I'm not just talking about Jim Crow, that affected many still-living black people. Our entire social and economic order is still to a very large extent built around the values and strengths of non-black people. Its not being 'fair' when you define virtue in terms of your own best advantages then punish others for falling short by that standard.

If it looks to you like black culture is doing more damage than white racism, I won't argue with that. I'm not going to deny the reality of what someone else can see, and I'm not in a good position to judge which of two diseases is worse. I was just trying to point out this other side too, what I see.

I recognize that we are all the same, even though every individual is also a little bit unique, and even though there are relationships between groups of individuals. I agree that everyone deserves a chance

It sounds like you decided that since it's not realistic for the whole of black men to have power over the whole of white men, that you've extrapolated that into believing that it's not possible for a black man to have power over a white man.

White man walks through black neighborhood, gets attacked by black men because he's white. If you don't count that as racism than you should probably stop trying to use words at all.

How about they do the same thing for Romney looking at the week before the election? There were a very large number of racist tweets against him - threats to assassinate, start riots, start fires, etc.

I don't understand this. "Don't go after the white folk racists! Them blacks is just as bad!" Why are we trying to shift the blame so that if some blacks call whites crackers and some whites call blacks niggers let's just call it even? How about we call them both out without downplaying one side OR the other. The "but they do it too" game is itself inherently racist because it detracts from the point that racism directed in any direction is immoral.